When I first heard about the Gloucester, Massachusetts high school girls who made a pact to become pregnant and to raise their children together, I wasn’t surprised by the media reaction to this Time story. Some reporters pulled a knee-jerk response that called for more birth control and sex education. The reaction from other writers is to criticize the previous reactions and to call for more discipline, a stronger sense of responsibility, and no public funds used to support any of the girls. As one article stated bluntly, “They made their ‘choice,’ and they can live with the consequences.”
My initial reaction to the Time story was, “It takes a village.” While a few friends thought my reaction was funny, I didn’t intend it as a joke. In fact, this pact reminded me of my time spent in a little town in Colorado, where I belonged to a group of families that took this philosophy seriously. Kids were dropped off at one family’s house, sometimes for days at a time while their parents went to Denver or off to some remote mountain top. In exchange, the host parents felt free to leave their children with other families to go off for a few days. The kids felt at home in over a dozen residences in that town. And, they knew that love - as well as discipline - was the same across the board. No manipulation allowed!
So, when I read the Time article and the subsequent media fallout, I wondered what prompted these seventeen teens to initiate this pact. Where they trying to build community? Or, was this decision a result of delusional and immature thinking? The teens and their parents decline to be interviewed. Instead, psychologists, school officials and other authority figures feel obligated to express their reasons for the pact. The high school clinic nurse, Kim Daly, stated that, “This is a community that is very much struggling…Some probably see this as something to do…Having a baby gives them an identity.” And, from the same story, Superintendent Christopher Farmer told the Gloucester School Committee that, “This is a community problem.”
But, what is this community like, and what, exactly, is the problem?
First, Gloucester may be struggling as a fishing community, but it has been a thriving artist community since the early nineteenth century. Think Winslow Homer, Emile Gruppe, Edward Hopper and Jane Peterson among other famous artists who made Gloucester home - even if on a temporary basis. But, painting and printmaking are just part of the overall picture. Sculptors, writers, actors and actresses, filmmakers and other creative types have found homes here.
Additionally, Gloucester’s census records show that this community has a graduation rate five percentage points higher than the state average and a student poverty rate that is three percentage points lower than the state average. So, this town seems to show a socioeconomic portrait that doesn’t fit the typical teen-pregnancy scenario. In the typical situation, teen pregnancies are affected by lower educational levels and higher rates of poverty. But, Gloucester’s median per capita income in 1999 was $47,722 and approximately 8.8 percent of the entire town population lived below the poverty line. According to the Time article, residents feel the pinch of outsourcing, and they must feel the crunch brought on by high gas prices. Still, my feeling is that Gloucester is an average American community. Many Americans are feeling those monetary pressures, yet there hasn’t been a rash of pregnancy pacts nationwide.
The school also supports young mothers, so this community has effectively avoided the typical teen mother dropout syndrome. From the Time article:
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
“Too good a job of embracing young mothers”? What does that mean? Should young mothers be punished? What are the penalties? Stoning, perhaps?
You might think that these girls have grown up in a faith-starved community - but don’t count on it. John Murray, the founder of the first Universalist Church in America lived here, as did the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church. Despite this ‘left’ leaning associated with these two religions, Gloucester is predominantly Catholic to the point that twice in the last 30 years women’s clinics failed to take root. In other words, contraception is not an issue, since - according to the Catholic faith - contraception negates the creative act of God. On the other hand, sex outside of marriage is frowned upon as well, since all sexual acts are to lead to procreation. This is something readers do know - that these girls were bound and determined to procreate.
Children from broken homes are significantly more likely to engage in early sexual activity than their peers from intact, two-parent families, according to a 1994 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. As a further note, that same 1994 study showed that white teenage girls whose mothers work for pay full-time outside the home are more likely to have multiple sex partners than girls whose mothers do not work for pay full-time. Gloucester is predominantly white (97 percent in 2000), but - again - we don’t know if the mothers of these girls work outside the home or if they are single parents, as that information is not available.
Since Gloucester’s environment doesn’t provide easy answers to the reason behind the girls’ pact to become pregnant together, perhaps the “problem” needs to be addressed. In sum, the problem seems to be the fact that men in their twenties - including one homeless man - were the fathers. This is not news, as the American Journal of Public Health produced a study in the early 1990s that showed adult men fathered two-thirds of the infants born to school-aged mothers in California in 1993:
On average, these men were 4.2 years older than the senior-high mothers and 6.7 years older than the junior-high mothers. A review of California’s 1990 vital statistics found that men older than high school age sired 77 percent of all births to high school-aged girls (ages 16-18) and 51 percent of births to junior high school-aged girls (15 and younger). Men over age 25 fathered twice as many teenage births as did boys under age 18, and men over age 20 fathered five times more births to junior high school-aged girls than did junior high school-aged boys.
Are you shocked by these statistics? Then you haven’t followed Michael Males‘ work on American teenagers and, specifically, on his studies concerning teens and older partners. This study has been around for about fifteen years now.
Perhaps you’re pondering the question of statutory rape in the Gloucester situation at this point. First, according to the FBI definition, statutory rape is characterized as non-forcible sexual intercourse with a person who is younger than the statutory age of consent. This seems to fit the situation in Gloucester. However, states vary on punishment for this act, and Massachusetts law about sex can be read a number of ways in this situation. Was abuse involved? That one word, “abuse,” can lead to life imprisonment. Otherwise, depending upon the girls’ actual ages, most of the men may walk away with fines and minimal prison sentences. Remember - these girls wanted to become pregnant, so the girls may face prostitution charges as well, according to Massachusetts law. Of course, the media hasn’t brought that side of the story to light yet.
Although Superintendent Christopher Farmer stated that this unusual situation was a community problem, he also asserted in May that he has heard relatively little about this issue from parents or concerned community members. Only two letters to local newspapers have been published about the pregnancies since March, and the school clinic nurse, Kim Daly, has stated that the community seems ambivalent about the pregnancies. But, heavens know that the nation is in an uproar about it - or, at least the nation’s media seems overtly concerned.
What I don’t understand is why this story is getting so much more coverage than this week’s report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. He states that the Bush administration committed war crimes at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Is it the fact that it’s an election year that this story has been buried? Is it easier to focus on a teen’s moral problems rather than the lack of morals displayed at Abu Ghraib?
All I know is that a village can raise a child (although I refuse to debate Hillary Clinton’s perspectives on this topic). That child doesn’t need a nation’s attention until much later. Those Gloucester teens and their parents have every right to their privacy and to their futures. Let’s move on to something more important - something like seeking justice for Abu Ghraib. After all, the media knows more about the atrocities committed at that prison than they do about the Gloucester teens. War crimes, my friends, are a national concern.
Posted by Linda at 3:47 AM PDT
